Google Analytics: Tracking Multiple Subdomains

We recently rolled out OneThreeOneFour for Hong Kong – a localised version in traditional Chinese. Our main website is on www.onethreeonefour.com while the new localised version is on zh.onethreeonefour.com

We chose to use subdomains to manage the various languages. Unlike subfolders, each subdomain is considered as a different website. Hence, it got us thinking if it is possbile for Google Analytics to track visitors across different websites.

I want to keep all the data under a single Property in our Google Analytics account.

Now that you are tracking vistors across your subdomains, the next step would be creating relevant Views for each website.

Create specific Views and Filters for each subdomain

By having a specific View for each of the sub domain, we can isolate the traffic between our main website and the other subdomains. In my case, I’m interested to see how many visitors we have on our English, Tradition Chinese and combined traffic.

By default, Google Analytics only displays the URI If you don’t create separate Views for each website, you won’t be able to differentiate which subdomain your visitor has landed. On the reports, it would simply show up as /about-us without indicating if it is from www.onethreeonefour.com or from zh.onethreeonefour.com.

You would need to create at least three Views. One Master view for reporting combined traffic, one for your main website and another for the new subdomain. I name the Views, Master – onethreeonefour.com, www.onethreeonefour.com, zh.onethreeonefour.com.

For each of the subdomain views, I added the pre-defined filter, Include traffic only to the hostname. This way, you will have isolated the traffic to these specific view making accurate analytics possbile.